Re: [PATCH v3] user-manual: add advanced topic "bisecting merges"

Steffen Prohaska <prohaska@zib.de> writes:

Hmm. When I wrote it, I did not mean this as a "solution", but as an illustration of how a merge heavy history and a linear history have impact on bisectability. So it is more like...

    On the other hand, if you did not merge at C but rebased the
    history between Z to B on top of A, you would have get this
    linear history [illustration here].  Bisecting between Z and
    D* would hit a single culprit commit Y* instead.  This tends
    to be easier to understand why it is broken.

For this reason, many experienced git users, even when they are working on an otherwise merge-heavy project, keep the histories linear by rebasing their work on top of public upstreams before publishing (when able). An extreme example: merges from a few top-level lieutenants to Linus in the kernel, e.g. David Miller, are known to _almost always_ fast-forward for Linus.

IOW, the description is to mildly encourage private rebasing to keep the job of later bisecting (for potentially others) easier. I realize I originally wrote as if C (merge) was made by the same person as the person who ends up bisecting, but that is not necessarily the case. Keeping the history without needless merges tend to make _other_ people's lives simpler.

And after encouraging the private rebasing, I would continue like...

    But if you already made a merge C instead of rebasing, all
    is not lost.  In the illustrated case, you can easily rebase
    one parent branch on top of the other after the fact, just
    to understand the history and to make the history more
    easily bisectable.  Even though the published history should
    not be rewound without consent with others in the project,
    nobody gets hurt if you rebased to create alternate history
    privately.  After understanding the breakage and coming up
    with a fix on top of D*, you can discard that rebased
    history, and apply the same fix on top of D, as D* and D
    should have the identical trees.